MLF overloading our server... (Bugs)

by BrianC, Monday, December 07, 2009, 06:16 (3569 days ago)

Dear Alex,

We've been using MLF for a few years (and continue to think it excellent). We have several forums on our site with the main one now running to 37680 Postings in 6562 Threads with 493 registered members.

The problem I am about to outline is different to the one you provided a fix for when doing a search of the user posts described at: http://mylittleforum.net/bugtracker/view.php?id=2 . I had implemented that bug fix at the time and that cured that problem.

In the last week or so our server has started to overload with the cpus overloading at 87% yesterday. Normally they've been running at around 30-40% capacity.

I'm still trying to trace the problem definitively but from information supplied by our service providers a lot of other forums from Dupral, PHPBoard, etc have experienced similar problems with the search facility not of user posts but when people do a general search of the database. The problem starts to appear for large databases. It seems, from discussions I've read concerning some of these other forums, that the solution might be to limit any search to say 90 day periods rather than have the search try and navigate the entire database. For example see this discussion in relation to the another type of forum HERE. Our database now stretches back to June 2006.

Has anyone else got to the stage of encountering this problem or come up with a fix yet? At present I've disabled the search facility on our forum while I hunt around for a solution. Our forum which is affected by this problem can be found HERE.

MLF overloading our server...

sounds strange to me! There are 'old' (i.e. 1.x) as well as current (2.x) versions of mlf on the net with >500000 posts. Never heard of any problems. The proposed solution to limit the search to let's say 90 days would render most forums useless. Sorry, and heads up!

MLF overloading our server...

Thanks, Helmut. We're still trying to find a solution. What is surprising is that the usual figures for uniques, visits, pagereads, hits and bandwidth are very stable. It is only the cpu usage that has suddenly rocketed up. Someone posted a message on our forum on 20 Nov suggesting how fabulous the "search the forum" facility was and a few days later the cpu usage started rocketing up. I thought his message might have triggered many others to use the search facility and, in turn, this triggered some condition like the earlier one Alex fixed re the "user area". I now have a friend assisting who is much more savvy about server configurations and mysql databases than I am so hopefully, between the two of us, we'll sort this out.